


Roll for Insight

by noxelementalist



Category: Krypton (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Banter, First Meetings, Geek Love, M/M, Meet-Cute, Shirtless, Sort of that last one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 09:45:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16195004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxelementalist/pseuds/noxelementalist
Summary: “I bet if I had a soulmate, they’d be smart enough to let me know it in code!”





	Roll for Insight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).



> Written for the Fandom Growth Exchange 2017 Challenge for reeby10. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it: I tried my best!

_October 5, 2003_

“This is weird.”

Joshua Strange— Doctor Strange to his students— chuckled to himself. “What’s weird?” he asked his six-year old son.

“This,” Adam told him, a serious look on his face as he waved a piece of paper in the air.

“Here, let me see,” Dr. Strange said, reaching over to grab the page his son had been reading. He had explained to Adam many times over that he didn’t need to come sit in the living room and help his father grade student essays, but each time Adam insisted it was better than trying to watch TV on mute. Which meant that, once a month, Joshua would find himself sitting next to his son in the living room of their Detroit apartment with student essays spread out in neat stacks living room table for them to go through.

“It doesn’t look _too_ weird,” he told Adam as he skimmed. “What’s wrong with it?”

“That,” Adam replied, pointing at the center of the page.

“Oh really? That’s what’s wrong with it?”

Adam nodded enthusiastically.

“Soulmates as philosophically conceptualized seem to provide for the satisfactory resolution of dualistic social recognition into a teleological unity that is necessitated from our society’s constant desire for intimate connection locked in dialectical engagement with the need for personalized individuating,” Joshua read aloud, “but the likelihood of such sublimated unification is severely and fundamentally disrupted by the lack of an actual archaeological record indicating any socially-recognizable behavioral patterns that would support or encourage the discovery of such entities, therefore suggesting that the existence of soulmates is significantly more a literary cultural archetype than an actual biological, archaeological, or social anthropological phenomenon.”

 “Wow,” Joshua said when he finished. “This student _really_ likes to string words along.”

“Big words,” Adam told his father solemnly. “So it’s gotta be wrong.”

“Or they’re just bad at writing.”

“If they can’t say it so a kid like me can know what they’re talking about, then they’re stupid and wrong.”

Joshua laughed. “We’ll take off points for bad writing.”

“And lying?”

“Well, they aren’t lying really…”

Adam looked his father. “Aren’t they?” he asked.

Joshua shook his head. “We haven’t found proof of anyone telling you how to find a soulmate in any dig we’ve done. They could just be a story.”

Dr. Strange watched as Adam’s eyes grew wide. “Is that what he said!” he shouted, his hands forming tiny fists. “Then he’s _really_ a dummy!”

“What makes you say that?”

“Who goes around telling people how to find their soulmate? You could get fake ones!”

“Son-”

“Which is bad, ‘cause who wants a fake soulmate? But if you don’t tell them, then you won’t get any,” Adam argued, waving his hands in the air in a way that reminded his father of some of his coworkers at University of Detroit Mercy. “So you wouldn’t tell people how to do that, and since no one’s saying anything you wouldn’t find anything, because there wouldn’t be anything.”

“Then let’s tell him that.”

“Yeah, yeah give me the red,” Adam said, picking up a red crayon that Dr. Strange had heard Adam telling his wife was his ‘mark-up crayon.’

“What are you going to write?” Joshua asked his son curiously.

Adam hummed. “That he uses too many big words, and that there totally _are_ soulmates, they’re just hiding whatever makes them soulmates.”

“That sounds like a very nice compromise.”

“I know I should be meaner, but I’m little,” Adam told him conversationally. “I kinda need to be nice.”

“Yes, it’s perfectly okay for you to compromise,” Dr. Strange said, making a mental note to remind his students not to take his son’s comments _too_ seriously.

“Can’t find soulmates,” Adam huffed as Dr. Strange turned back to his papers. “Stupi-head. I bet if _I_ had a soulmate, they’d be smart enough to let me know it in code!”

 

_October 5, 2018_

Alana Lewis was the complete package, Adam found himself thinking. She was smart, she was funny, she was—

“I don’t think this is going to work.”

—breaking up with him, Adam realized with a start, his head shooting up from the table in the library that he’d rested it on. “What, but-” he stammered.

“Have you _ever_ committed to anything in your life?” Alana asked him, not even pausing in closing her laptop and putting it into its carry case as she verbally tore his heart apart. “I know you Adam. We’ve been together since that time in freshmen year you went on a rant about how missing soul marks didn’t mean anything-”

“Alana-”

“And every time, every _time_ it gets hard, you’re out of here so fast it’s like you stole some alien teleportation device-”

“ _Hey_ , that’s not-”

“And I’m tired of it Adam,” Alana finished. “I can’t wait three more years for you at this table to decide what you want to do in life, to figure out what you _even_ care about. ‘Cause it sure as hell ain’t me. So goodbye Adam,” she whispered, her voice softly firm as she turned to leave. “I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for.”

Adam sat there stunned as he watched the girlfriend of the last three years of his life walk away. “What just happened?” he asked himself, glancing around to confirm for himself that nobody else had seen him being dumped near midterms in the libraries of Wayne State University, only to slowly pack his own backpack up and sling it over his shoulder once he was sure.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen it coming, Adam admitted to himself as he exited the library, the crisp fall air feeling comfortingly chill on his face as he walked outside. Alana was already nearing the middle of a joint Bachelor’s/Master’s in chemical engineering, her core courses long done and the beginnings of a research stream starting to be published in the university journals. The same excellence showed itself in everything she did, whether it was pick-up games of soccer on the quad or socializing at networking receptions. The only thing _close_ to a blemish was her lack of a soul mark, and even that wasn’t a problem once she explained her clothes covered it, a remark that had always left Adam restraining the urge to smirk because he knew, from intimate experience, _exactly_ where it was.

Meanwhile, Adam was still trying to figure out his major after extreme boredom— and, he could admit to himself, his father’s death— led him to switch out of majoring in archaeology, leaving him only one more month to declare a major at all if he wanted to avoid being labeled an academic burnout. He knew didn’t come across excellently: the only thing athletic about him was his love of the Detroit Tigers, and he’d happily spend the rest of his life bumming around in worn jeans and green hoodies telling people exactly how wrong they were, in excruciating detail, if he could find a way to get paid for doing that. And— unlike Alana— Adam really, genuinely didn’t have a soul mark.

 _Visible anyway,_ he corrected himself, dodging a few freshmen as he walked.

It had barely been 10 years since cosmic forces still being studied by psychology and physiology students the world over had finally caused soul marks to appear. “There’s now no doubt that the basic question has been answered. Yes, we all have soulmates and yes, we are marked so they can find us,” Adam could remember his father lecturing on the topic back when he was in high school. “The question now is _how_ : how do we find them? How will we know when we have?”

For most folks, the answer had turned out to be easily, quickly, and decisively.

Not so for Adam. Adam had been with his dad in Peru on a dig during Spring Break when the marks emerged, shimmering into existence with an omnidirectional blast of haloing white light. But while everyone else panicked and called their loved ones— Adam’s mom, thankfully, had confirmed over the phone that she had the same mark as his dad, unlike a lot of other people at the site— Adam had remained chill while shadowed by the blazing beams.

Days past and other reports came in. Reports that there were marks which looked like words, like pictures, like phrases and designs. Reports of marks that were scented, audible, countered color-blindness, _caused_ color-blindness. Even reports that talked of marks showing themselves in more colorful showers of light, in booms of sound, and even some that had been accompanied by geese guardians that shepherded people together. By the time the end of Spring Break had come, humanity had found themselves dealing with the largest simultaneous wave of found friendships, partnerships, families, marriages and divorces in their recorded history.

Adam had been left with only two things. One was a farmer’s tan that left his white Irish skin looking paler than ever when it had faded. The other was a burn scar on the back of his shoulder from where an Incan bracelet had fallen off his dad’s work table and smacked him where he’d been on the floor, reading about archeologists that seriously thought the Nazca ruins were the remaining tracks on the landing strips from extraterrestrial commercial airline travels. Neither of which was a soul mark.

At least, that’s what everyone thought. Adam had maintained that clearly, _clearly_ his mark was coded and just had to be cracked. It was a statement that had gotten him admitted on scholarship to Wayne State; a scholarship to study cryptography, although the class had proven to be useless in deciphering his mark; and a thesis whose defense had gotten him a girlfriend on his first day of class, a girlfriend that for the last three years hadn’t been offended with him being out of step and _very_ out as a bisexual.

“At least, I thought she wasn’t too offended, but hey, guess some people really do think you have to pick sides, at least when it comes to stupid things like majors that only college bureaucrats and snobs care about. Whatever,” Adam muttered to himself as he made the turn on the sidewalk that he knew would take him off campus and into downtown Detroit. “It’s not like we were soulmates or anything.”

Adam wandered for a few minutes downtown, shifting his backpack onto his other shoulder after it started hanging uncomfortably. “Man, I could use caffeine right now,” he said, feeling the adrenaline of being broken up with starting to crash. Looking around revealed he’d managed to walk into a mostly developing block, the storefronts almost all empty except for—

“Oh, hello,” Adam said to himself as he spotted what looked like a coffee shop a couple blocks ahead. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Coming closer Adam saw that the store was named “Kem’s,” the name tagged out on a metallic sign with white spray paint. The windows were tinted, but Adam could see through them to a large room with small tables and worn furniture scattered around that— to him— would’ve fit better in something like a dive bar than any coffee shop he’d been in. There were barely opened crates on the floor, and Adam got the impression that “Kem’s,” whatever it was, was still in the process of setting up.

Adam was almost at the door when it swung outward, knocking him onto the ground.

“My apologies,” a British voice said. “Are you- oh, wow.”

“I’m okay,” Adam grumbled, slowly opening his eyes to see a young man with pitch black hair, fair skin, dreamily blue eyes and legs that seemed to go on for days leaning over him worriedly. “I’m okay.”

“Your shirt’s not,” the man said, just as Adam’s attempt to stand up combined with the weight of his backpack hanging down to make him stumble, the movement causing Adam look down and see what looked like a large, oily brown stain on his shirt as he tried to right himself, stepping on what he guessed was the remains of the other man’s coffee cup on the ground.

 _Well, at least I know they have coffee_. _And- oh, no,_ he realized when he looked more carefully at the other man, who had reached out to put a hand against Adam’s shoulder. _He’s hot. And I’m single._

“Tell you what, let me fix that up for you,” the man was saying.

“Wait, what?” Adam asked as he started to pay attention to the guy in front of him. “Sorry, I missed that.”

“I was just saying that I’d like to fix your shirt. We have a washer and dryer here,” he said, gesturing to the store. “Just go inside and tell Kem that Seg said to hook you up with a change of clothes, and we’ll get these fixed in a tick so you don’t stand out too much.”

“Thanks?” Adam asked, feeling slightly dazed as the man walked off. “Well, that happened,” Adam muttered to himself. “Guess I better go see a Kem about a shirt.”

 Shrugging he turned and pulled the door to shop open.

“Seg, I _swear_ , I will- oh,” a voice from the backroom said. “You’re not Seg.”

Adam looked up and saw another man emerge from the backroom. Like the man Adam guessed was named Seg this one was also dark-haired and dark-eyed, but he was slimmer in build and his hair seemed to have been sculpted into a mess of a bird’s nest, a pattern that the man had paired with a leather jacket, dark denim jeans, a wool scarf wrapped around his neck, and— _holy hell, he’s wearing guyliner,_ Adam thought to himself, gulping as he felt a frisson of desire wave through him.

_Whoever is listening out there, please, please let the raver be single. Or at least willing to give me new clothes._

“And who might you be, my fair-ginger dream?” the man asked with a grin.

“I was sent to hook up with you,” Adam blurted out. “Seg, ah, that is, he said to talk to a Kem about a clothes’ hook up,” he added a beat later, gesturing at his shirt.

The man sighed wearily. “Of _course_ he did.”

“And I, ah, wanted someon-thing, something to quench my thirst.”

“…right,” the man said at last, Adam watching as he began to grin. “Well, we do offer full service here at Kem’s, or we will once we’re officially open for business next month. I’m Kem, by the way.”

“Adam.”

“Well Adam,” Kem said, flicking on what looked to Adam like a super-sized version of the hot water boiler he had in his dorm room before walking out from behind the bar towards him. “Just throw me your shirt and I’ll throw it in the laundry. It should be done by the time you’ve finished drinking something. And don’t worry about being modest,” he added. “The windows are tinted, and we’re not due to open for a few weeks yet, so there’s no crowd coming.”

“You know, normally I get the drink before I have to strip,” Adam said as he walked towards Kem, gingerly sliding his backpack and hoodie onto a nearby table before hauling his shirt off and flinging it the few remaining feet at the man, who caught out without sparing it a glance.

“Just how _often_ \- oh, you _are_ fit, aren’t you?” Kem said, sounding surprised to Adam.

“…Yes?” Adam said hesitantly, suddenly realizing that a very attractive man was staring at him while holding his coffee-drenched wreck of a t-shirt.

“I…can see that. Would you like sugar or cream?”

“Ah, I’d like both in my coffee thanks,” Adam stammered. “And I-I, ah, would rather- that is, I’m just going to cover all of this up now,” he added, turning to lean down and grab his hoodie off the table.

“Stop.”

Adam stopped, the press of the tabletop making him painfully aware of just how much he had bent over it. “What?”

“Your shoulder.”

“Yes.”

“What’s that written there?”

“Written- oh you mean the burn scar,” Adam grumbled. “Nothing is, _really_ , I-”

“Did it appear on Mark day?”

“…yes? Why do you-”

“Wait, just, don’t move,” Kem said, turning and running into the back with Adam’s shirt in his hand, his disappearance soon followed by what sounded like the sound of footsteps running on stairs. “And don’t put on that hoodie yet!”

“…Yeah, this isn’t awkward or anything,” Adam said, reaching into his hoodie’s pocket for his smartphone. He had just finished loading Candy Crush when—

“-read this, and then tell me what it says,” Kem said.

Adam looked up to see Kem standing very close to him, his face flush from what Adam guessed must’ve been a sprint, holding up in front of Adam a binder that had been opened to a page titled **Kandorian dialect of Kryptonese** in the top in bold.

“That’s an alphabet,” Adam said, scanning over the page to see a set of signs that looked eerily like the symbols the bracelet had let. “That’s-this is-”

“I invented it when I was six,” Kem said as Adam read. “I wanted a code language to write notes to Seg in so our teachers couldn’t read them aloud if they caught us, and I already had this make-believe world I-”

“This- according to this,” Adam said, not listening to Kem speak. “The scar on my shoulder reads- and who might…you be…my fa…ir-”

“Ginger dream,” Kem finished. “You-You’re my soulmate. You can translate on sight, and you’re my _soulmate_.”

“I-but, wait, did I,” Adam started to ask just as Kem pulled the scarf off his neck, revealing a mark that read “I was sent to hook up with you,” the words proudly wrapped around Kem’s neck like a choker and written in a messy, blockish scrawl Adam knew was his own.

“You’re- I _knew_ my soulmate was smart enough to write in code!” Adam said gleefully.

“Kem. Kem Rankless,” Kem said, reaching out to grab Adam’s hand. “Philosophy major, gay, and soon proud co-owner and operator of Kem’s, Detroit’s finest coffee and comics shop.”

“Adam. Adam Strange,” Adam said as he grabbed Kem’s hand. “Former Archaeology major, bisexual, and until now newly single.”

 “Hi.”

Adam grinned. “Hey, I’d say I’m sorry about what I said, but I’m really, _really_ not,” he said as he pulled Kem into a kiss.

 “You know,” Kem managed to say after a few— not long enough, in Adam’s opinion— moments. “I have perfectly good bed upstairs that’s waiting to be put to use. Not that I don’t appreciate my soulmate being an exhibitionist-”

“That is an _excellent_ idea,” Adam replied. “Although…”

“Yes?”

“I have _so_ _many_ _questions_ about the title of that page. Like, why are there dialects?”

“Oh no,” Kem grumbled.

“I mean, is it a language kink thing?” Adam continued, making Kem burst out laughing.

“You really want to know _now_?”

“I think it’s perfectly reasonable to know what my soulmate was thinking before helping him christen a bed in what I guarantee will be a pleasurable and time-consuming manner.”

“I- may have invented an entire fictional world that’s getting serialized as a comic book. Complete with multiple languages. And religions. And a hierarchical class system.”

“…Babe.”

“So naturally you need different dialects and slangs for each of those, rights? And I figured, well Kem, if you’re going all in, you should at least do it _right_.”

“ _Babe._ ”

“I know, I know, it’s-”

“Extremely competent and _brilliant_ of you, which I am 100% into,” Adam said, pulling Kem against him. “I’ll want full details of all of it in an hour.”

“An hour?”

“That washer _had_ better last at least that long for what I intend to do to you once I strip you out of all this leather,” Adam said before kissing Kem again. 

_***  
_

“So let me see if I got this,” Adam said, glancing up from the binder on the floor of Kem’s upstairs bedrooms to look at Kem ( _my soulmate_ , Adam reminded himself), who had been leaning his head over Adam’s shoulder. The two of them had sprawled out on Kem’s bed, blankets and clothes long knocked off onto the ground in favor of pressing against each other, Kem’s hands idly tracing distracting patterns across Adam’s shoulders from where he lay on Adam’s back while Adam had tried to update himself on an entire fictional culture with all the grace of a late-night study cram session. “You created a pseudo-Victorian-esque alien empire, ran it from an eight-deity polytheistic society to a scientific monotheistic society into an Age of Enlightenment smack down, complete with a five-tiered guild-structured trade economy, a caste system, _and_ regional dialects?”

“And created enough plant and wildlife to fill a zoologist’s daydream of a biosphere survey, yes love, I did,” Kem whispered into Adam’s ear. “It’s called Krypton, and it’s been serialized online for the last five years. Seg’s been trying to get me fund a print run or design some roll-play game off of it.”

“I’ll be happy to play that game,” Adam said, turning over so that he could hug Kem against his chest, loving the feeling of being able to run his hands down a back that had turned out to be very flexible in all the best ways. “In fact, I can promise you at least three departments worth of college students would play that game.’

“And who would you play?”

Adam rolled his eyes. “Obviously the lone Earth character trying to save the universe.”

“Obviously?”

“For one thing, I’m _way_ too American to fake British that well, and I won’t let upend your system just to write me in, soulmate or no.”

Kem laughed. “I suppose that means I’d have to, what, play the bartender that tries to help you adjust to a world you don’t understand?”

“Yes,” Adam told him as he gave into the urge the grope his soulmate, the gesture causing Kem to grind slightly against him. “We’ll both try to keep whatever Seg plays alive-”

“- Probably lost space prince, the git-”

“-and meanwhile I’ll teach you about fist bumps, the Detroit Lions and being human.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Kem said. “Will you have a catchphrase?”

“Never stop searching. What,” Adam said when Kem laughed at him, “it’s like the first rule of archaeology!”

“Which you dropped.”

“Yeah, but,” Adam started, only to be cut off by Kem kissing him again.

“You know, there’s a whole new era I’m working on,” Kem said when he pulled back.

“Ah-yeah?” Adam asked dazedly.

“Yes. Romanticism,” Kim said, smirking wickedly. “Care to help me research?”

“I’ll be the best case study you’ve ever done,” Adam swore.

 

 

 

[The third round of study was put on hold when twenty minutes later Seg walked into the room, complaining about having to turn off the hot water maker before it burnt down the store, only to start swearing that this _wasn’t_ what he had meant by “hooking up.”]


End file.
